It’s been an odd week. Sunday brought the news that a man I have admired for over 30 years had finally found peace and passed over after suffering from pancreatic cancer. Dith Pran. He had a website that made it possible to communicate directly with him and I felt honored to be included in his final months.
I first discovered him back in the 1970’s when he worked with Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times who was a correspondent in Cambodia during the Viet Nam war. When he and Sydney first started working together they witnessed the devastation of a U.S. bombing attack on a vital river crossing on the highway linking Phnom Penh with eastern Cambodia. Dith recalled in a 2003 article for the Times what it was like to watch U.S. planes attacking enemy targets and I kept this quote: "If you didn't think about the danger, it looked like a performance," he said. "It was beautiful, like fireworks. War is beautiful if you don't get killed. But because you know it's going to kill, it's no longer beautiful."
Schanberg moved to Phnom Penh because he recognized that what was happening there was an unfolding catastrophe. He hired Pran full time, and together they covered the deterioration of Lon Nol’s corrupt government and the gathering power of the Khmer Rouge, culminating in 1975 in the communist victory, and the mayhem that followed.
After Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia in 1979 and seized control of territory, Pran’s choice to stay in Phnom Penh and at Syndey’s side when the Khmer Rouge took over is now a piece of history. (The film The Killing Fields) Schanberg was soon expelled and Pran was sent to labor camps where he somehow endured the tortures that took the lives of as many as two million Cambodians, including many in his family. Dith escaped from the camps,dodging both Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge forces, to reach a border refugee camp in Th
ailand. From the Thai camp he sent a message to Sydney, who rushed from the United States for an emotional reunion with the trusted friend he felt he had abandoned four years earlier. "I had searched for four years for any scrap of information about Pran," Schanberg said. "I was losing hope. His emergence in October 1979 felt like an actual miracle for me. It restored my life." On their last meeting on Saturday just before Pran died he told Syndey “I promise to send you my dreams” as assurance they will continue to be together. They both acknowledged they were more than brothers.
Dith spoke and wrote often about his wartime experience and remained an outspoken critic of the Khmer Rouge regime. When Pol Pot died in 1998, Dith said he was saddened that the dictator was never held accountable for the genocide. "The Jewish people's search for justice did not end with the death of Hitler and the Cambodian people's search for justice doesn't end with Pol Pot," he said. He founded ‘The Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project’ (http://www.dithpran.org/) to educate “American students about the Cambodian genocide which occurred from April 17th, 1975 to January 7th, 1979.”
A man who could survive the horror and come through it with the outlook that Pran did, had a profound effect on me. He has always been a source of strength, and when things get overwhelming, I remind myself that people like Pran overcame things far worse than anything I will ever experience. He found beauty and joy and built a valued life! It really doesn’t matter what we own or the superficial things we sometimes make too important. It’s the contribution we make to the people in our lives, and the earth that is truly our legacy. I can only hope to do a small percentage of what Pran accomplished to feel like my life too, was a success.
Peace
Hannah
